Chatfield on adjuncting

My pal David Chatfield is an adjunct professor of art with a Catch-22. One of his school employers requires that he hold office hours, but only recently gave him an actual office to hold them in. The office, though, is essentially a storage closet for another academic department. His
response:

[D]o not call us adjunct. The word means "something added to another thing but not essential to it." We are absolutely essential.

And do not call us contingent. The word contingency means "a provision for an unforeseen event or circumstance." In other words, Plan B.

Increasingly, we are Plan A. We are the majority of higher ed teachers and yet are treated like we are still Plan B.

More.

Still Calling

Yay! Brendan's back!

Romney's tax returns are out there and have been for 4 years

Sometime in 2008, as part of John McCain's vetting process for a vice-presidential candidate, Mitt Romney "reportedly provided McCain's team with more than 20 years of tax returns, significantly more than the amount of information Romney has made public this time around" (CNN). McCain didn't pick Romney for veep, so maybe there's some causal there there. Or maybe the causal there there is simply that Romney doesn't look as good as Sarah Palin does in a red leather jacket.

But my point, and I do have one, is: Oh, lordy. Will someone please, please, please leak these old tax returns already? Aw, man. They are out there. It can't possibly be the case that every last copy was shredded or deleted off all the hard drives when McCain picked Palin over Romney. It would be so easy, just one little click on "send" -- and we don't need all the schedules and attachments, either, just the 2-page 1040's (and only the second pages of those, at that). And we'd get to see if they prove Noz's theory that Romney was living the tax-free high life for some of those years.

Komen link round-up; local protest later today

Richer, smarter, and funnier minds than mine have explained why it's stupid for Susan G. Komen for the Cure to politicize women's healthcare by ending grants to Planned Parenthood that provide breast screenings to underserved American women. In short, cancer prevention activities make up some 16% of the patient care Planned Parenthood delivers, compared to 3% for abortion services. Math from figures in a Bloomberg Businessweek article indicates to me that Planned Parenthood used Komen grant money to provide about 172,000 breast exams in the past 5 years ("Komen grants paid for about 4.3 percent of the 4 million breast exams and 9 percent of the 70,000 mammogram referrals provided at Planned Parenthood clinics in the past five years, Planned Parenthood said"). That's not a whole lot of exams -- 34,000 per year -- and it was probably not even 172,000 individual women. But it's 172,000 exams that wouldn't have taken place without the grants, and it's 172,000 encounters with women who got some education on breast cancer prevention and detection.

Komen says they're "dedicated to the fight against breast cancer in the world." They need to add the qualifier, unless the service reaches you through Planned Parenthood.

EDIT: Word on the street is that there is a fundraiser for the Philadelphia Komen affiliate today at the Cescaphé Ballroom, 932 North 2nd Street, and that activists will gather at 5:30 p.m. to urge the affiliate to join those in Denver and Connecticut in telling the national organization that it sucks to politicize women's public health.

I am not surprised these two links came across my desk at about the same time this morning

Within 5 minutes of each other, these 2 links came across my screen this morning:

A very large (no pun intended) majority of American workers are overweight or obese or have a chronic health problem (WSJ).

"Ranch Dressing And Other Delights," a podcast episode discussing a few of the most horrifying entries at Allrecipes.com, includes links to American culinary masterpieces like Taco in a Bag, mayo-and-ketchup-based Pink Dippin' Sauce, and an E-Z casserole made with two types of canned corn, macaroni, a half-cup of butter, and a half-pound of processed cheese (The F Plus).

Correlation is not causation, but I think I'm going to have celery for lunch today anyway.

Tnx to readers far and not-so-far afield

Quick note to say thanks to Cup O' Joel, Pine View Farm, and Delaware Liberal for their kind links to my "uncertainty" post last week: "uncertainty" means different things to different people, and declining to hire more staff because of "uncertainty" about future economic and legal conditions is nonsense when your company makes a billion dollars in profits every quarter.

So that's why my mobile device has been flaky lately

Looks like one for the RISKS Digest, to me:

Sporadic outages of BlackBerry messaging and email service spread to the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, as problems stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. [...] Unlike other cellphone makers, [Research in Motion] handles email and messaging traffic to and from its phones. When it encounters a problem, millions of subscribers are affected at once. There are about 70 million BlackBerry users around the world.

(MSNBC.) I heard about the overseas outages the other day and was kinda hoping against hope that it wouldn't reach North America.

Philadelphia Film Festival's 20th Anniversary Film Festival

One of the city's innumerable film festivals is coming up soon. Convince me that I should make it the same full-contact sport that I used to. Or at least convince me which dozen films I should go see.

Oooh, wait -- a new Coriolanus with The Tree of Life's Jessica Chastain and a lot of explosions, starring and directed by Voldemort? Holy cow, I'm not sure how you can go wrong with that, except by not going to see it.

And something called Sleeping Beauty from Australia that bears some suspicious resemblance to Story of O, at least from the trailer. . . . Oh, and from the official website's synopsis, as well.

OK, so tell me which ten other films I should go see. But please don't suggest Barton Fink; I prefer Miller's Crossing.

Girls need sports. It's really not that hard a concept to grasp

Gah, my custody schedule changed, my daughter's school year and fall sports schedule began, and now I don't know where I'm going or what time I need to leave to get there. Thank christ for my desk calendar and my watch. Who needs Outlook and google calendars? Not this underemployed yet over-obligated lawyer. And don't get me started about this horrible kludgey third-party solution for my daughter's online school sports calendar.

And, no, she's not a cheerleader. But ooh, look, there's been some movement on the Title IX issue at Quinnipiac University. I'd given the school the benefit of the doubt when I wrote about the problem in July, 2010, but a trial court decided that I shouldn't have: the finding was that they really were trying to weasel out of Title IX requirements when they ditched their volleyball team in favor of a cheerleading squad.

Have you been following the case better than I have? Do you have a daughter (or niece or whatever) who plays a school sport? Public or private school? Please comment. Thanks!

Low attendance for art-house films? Don't blame Philadelphia audiences

I wouldn't say I'm having fun reading it all, so let's say rather that I'm feeling some validation that I'm not the only cinema enthusiast in this town who's had it up to here with the sad, sad state of independent, artistic, and repertory film in Philadelphia. From the Cinedelphia blog in the past few days:

Prince Music Theater: EPIC FAIL - A festival screening of a Sundance award-winning film, with the filmmaker in attendance, had to be canceled after everyone (including the filmmaker) had shown up, because the projectionist failed to come to work and nobody at the Prince knew how to run the projector and sound.

Cinefest continues to prove its lameness . . . UPDATED - Politics and internal conflicts ahoy at TLA and the Philadelphia Cinema Alliance threaten the continued presence of knowledgeable, talented programmers for the festival.

The Philadelphia Cinefest starts this week . . . - "[M]any of the festival's guests (John Carpenter, Lucky McKee) will be appearing via Skype rather than in-person[.]" That's a quote that speaks for itself. Even the industry doesn't take the Philadelphia film festivals seriously.

The city film festival used to be a full-contact sport for me. Now it's split into two separate festivals, plus separate weeks for films with an LGBT, Asian, and Jewish focus. It's a waste of time and duplication (quintuplication?) of effort to reinvent the wheel five times per year for all these festivals. All the festival participants -- the organizers, the venues, the filmmakers, and the audiences -- lose when we have, essentially, single weeks of recognition that aren't big enough to draw sponsors, media, and more important films. Philadelphia won't have a world-class festival until the organizers decide they want one world-class festival and work together to make it happen.

One last note on a comment in the "continues to prove its lameness" post referenced above. Joseph Gervasi of Exhumed Films is quoted as saying, "Our pals at Ibrahim Theater @ International House have all kinds of stimulating film programming all year round. The state of cinema isn't sad in our city; it's the state of attendance for the events of worth." You know, I love the I-House. The projection is great (unlike the woefully and embarrassingly underpowered projection and lousy, lousy sound at the Prince); the seats are great since they put the new ones in; and they bring so many great films around that I wish I could spend my entire weekend there. But you know what? That's the problem. In order to see all the films you want to see at the I-House, you have to spend your entire weekend there. When they bring a repertory film in for a screening, it's for one single screening. If you're not free at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday 23 April, for example, you will miss the sole screening of Harlan County USA that they're putting on. A couple of rarities from Lindsay Anderson and Ken Russell will screen one time only at 7:00 on Thursday 28 April. And Todd Haynes' Poison, a very important film in the American independent film movement of the 1990s? One screening, 7:00 on Friday 6 May.

Other repertory cinemas around the world get a print for a week and show it several times from Tuesday through Sunday. One scheme I've seen is to alternate the film with another by the same filmmaker or with other films of the same genre. It can be like a miniature thematic film festival every week; or it can be as simple as running the film once per night for three or four days, plus a Sunday matinee. But the I-House, after going through all the trouble of getting these fantastic new Janus prints and running them in their newly refurbished archive-quality booth, offers just one screening of every movie they get. And the blame goes onto the audiences?

It's like the vicious circle you can get in public transit ridership. You don't have a full train, so you cut the number of daily trains that run on that line. So fewer commuters take the train, because it doesn't run at a convenient time. So you run fewer trains because it's inefficient to run a train that isn't full. So fewer commuters take the train, etc.

Blaming the audience for the lousy state of attendance at venues like the I-House is a little rough. The I-House makes me decide between a single screening of a repertory film and a huge number of other entertainment choices in town. It really kind of killed me to miss Warhol's The Closet and Derek Jarman's Blue this past Friday, for example. I would have attended if there had been another screening -- but I had a professional commitment that directly conflicted that night. On Saturday I met friends for live music, so I missed Wakefield Poole's Bijou. I would have dragged alongbrought a guest, too, so that's some $24 or $32 the I-House didn't make last week.

Now, I don't know the screening agreements the I-House makes with its distributors (is it a fee per screening, or a fee for unlimited screenings while they have the prints?), and I don't know how much it costs to open the house (more than my $8, of course). And I know that they use the theater for other events, like live music, lectures, and summer bar exam prep. But as an entertainment lawyer and a non-profit arts attorney, and as a businessperson, I can confidently state that the I-House makes zero dollars when the theater isn't used at all. And I understand the issue, because I've been to screenings at theaters in the U.S. and in Europe where it's been myself and maybe two other parties in the house. But give audiences a break. Film screenings aren't the only "events of worth" in Philadelphia; but even when they are, they'd compete better if audiences had more opportunities to attend them.

CDC's food recall alerts: staph and E. coli and salmonella, oh my!

Best newsfeed ever: the CDC's food recall alerts. Your daily dose of E. coli O157:H7 contaminations and unlabeled potential allergens, ew. If this kind of thing doesn't keep you away from processed, packaged, and shelf-stable foods, I don't know what would.

"A perfect market requires perfect information"

[Forbes:] What do you think WikiLeaks mean for business? How do businesses need to adjust to a world where WikiLeaks exists?

[Julian Assange:] WikiLeaks means it’s easier to run a good business and harder to run a bad business, and all CEOs should be encouraged by this. I think about the case in China where milk powder companies started cutting the protein in milk powder with plastics. That happened at a number of separate manufacturers.

Let’s say you want to run a good company. It’s nice to have an ethical workplace. Your employees are much less likely to screw you over if they’re not screwing other people over.

Then one company starts cutting their milk powder with melamine, and becomes more profitable. You can follow suit, or slowly go bankrupt and the one that’s cutting its milk powder will take you over. That’s the worst of all possible outcomes.

The other possibility is that the first one to cut its milk powder is exposed. Then you don’t have to cut your milk powder. There’s a threat of regulation that produces self-regulation.

It just means that it’s easier for honest CEOs to run an honest business, if the dishonest businesses are more effected negatively by leaks than honest businesses. That’s the whole idea. In the struggle between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed companies, we’re creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical companies.

The leak I'm waiting for is, what's in it all for Julian Assange? I mean, if you think he's doing this out of the goodness of his heart, I have a bridge to sell you. Who's paying him?

When boys dress like girls

A five-year-old boy dressed up as Daphne from the Scooby-Doo cartoons, and a crew of moms from his kindergarten gave his mom a hard time. Mom fought back in a blog post that's been making the rounds:

Thirdly, I am not worried that your son will grow up to be an actual ninja so back off.

Ah, now that brings back memories! Memories of me and my BFF Stu when we were kids, playing superheroes and fighting over who got to play Wonder Woman, or playing Donny and Marie and fighting over who got to play Marie. And Stu never turned out -- oh, wait. No, hmm. Actually, as a matter of fact, Stu did turn out to be queer as a three-dollar bill. And he's in show business now.

But you know what? I love my big gay friend Stu, and I always will! Here's to you, Stu!

Shiny new credit cards

Got home from vacation to find that my credit card had been canceled a week ago due to some security problem at a vendor my card company won't identify. So they sent me new cards and I'm taking a few minutes this morning to update a few places where I have regular charges going onto that card.

Between things like this data compromise and the regular horror stories I read over at the Consumerist blog, is it really any wonder why I still pay most of my bills by check? Imagine if I had all my utilities and everything else that could be automated put on this card! I'd have had to spend all morning, rather than about 10 minutes, switching all the vendors to the new card. Yuck.

A march in D.C. on the 15th anniversary of OKC bombing

Today is the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the biggest act of domestic terrorism in the history of the United States.

Also today, there's a rally in Washington, D.C., for the teabaggers and right-wing militia nutcases.

This is what the marchers are commemorating:


It's no coincidence that this "Second Amendment March" is happening today, just as it was no coincidence that domestic terrorist, mass murderer, and baby killer Timothy McVeigh chose 19 April to blow up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City: it's the anniversary of the 1993 Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas. McVeigh killed 168 people, including 3 pregnant women and 19 children. He parked the truck bomb under the building's daycare.

Teabaggers, Oath Keepers, and "Second Amendment Advocates" are not your friends, and they're not patriotic Americans. They think McVeigh is a hero, and their Fox News spokespeople drop McVeigh's name as if he were a political leader and inspirational figure, not a brutal killer (video: from 7:45). And their message today is a threat that Oklahoma City will happen again.

Brendan says it better.

Mithras on recent news from the White House

Mithras, unlike a lot of the progressive/left-wing bloggers over the past couple of days, thoughtfully discusses President Obama's executive order on offshore drilling with calm, reason, facts, and a review of Obama's political strategy all along.

Also, a note about a real, concrete environmental win by the administration: a sharp reduction in the number of permits that will be issued for shaving Appalachian mountaintops for coal.

I'll add a comment about the health insurance reform bill as well. As President Obama mentioned in Iowa when he was heckled about the public option not being included in the bill, he "couldn't get it through Congress." So what we got was a lousy health reform bill, with minimal (but very tangible for a lot of people) advances for progressives. But understand: we got the changes; "progressive" means incremental change, not 180-degree turns; and a whole lot of Republicans are going to face their constituents come campaign time -- after people will have started to see a difference in their wallet -- having to explain why they voted against even these small changes.

And remember, the health insurance reforms aren't going to go away. They're only going to be improved on and expanded, though of course it'll be two steps forward, one step back. It's always been this way in the deliberately broken scheme of separation of powers we have.

Barack Obama has always been a politician. The executive order about federally funded abortions was meaningless. Read it. It merely points out to the various agencies where they need to look in the health insurance reform bill to follow the rules. The order was a piece of paper tossed at Republican obstructionists, showing that it's the other party in the debate that's willing to, well, debate and come to the table for a conversation.

I think it's been President Obama's strategy since the day he entered politics: be the person who's (seen as being) willing to talk, discuss, and compromise, while making the other party look like a completely unreasonable, uncompromising asshole. I don't know if it'll work in the long term, but it sure is hard to see from day to day. What else is sure is that a lot of instant WHARRGARBL from the left every time the Republicans get what will end up to be a fake win doesn't help.

On flash mobs, take two

On Saturday 20 March, there was a flash mob on South Street. Jeff Deeney, in discussing his perspective on Philadelphia youth flash mobs over at Phawker, wonders what really happened, considering the Philadelphia media's tendency to play up scary stories for their suburban readers and viewers when it comes to minority youth in the city:

But was there even a flash mob? When the story first broke I spent hours scouring Twitter and Facebook looking for evidence of a trail I could track back to those calling for a flash mob, and couldn't find it. I was able to find exactly [one] Twitter feed whose user mentioned getting texts about going to South Street, which, on the first warm Saturday night of the year, most kids would have done anyway. Now Gawker has reported that the flash mob was nothing more than performances by couple dance troupes that got out of control. The fact that the police department was calling it a flash mob organized on social networking sites should have been taken with a grain of salt because anyone who's worked with the department knows that your average Philly cop is CAPS LOCK GUY who still has an AOL account, isn't exactly up on new trends online, and might not be the most reliable source for this kind of information.

I don't doubt that a lot of Philly police officers are behind the times when it comes to using the Internet. And I also don't doubt that the Inky and other media outlets are desperate to do what they can for pageviews and TV ratings.

I participated in the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, and I saw firsthand what happens after tens of thousands of people march peacefully for hours, and then the media notices a few knuckleheads breaking windows after most of the marchers have started to leave for home. All that America saw on the evening news was a few seconds of sensational footage of the window-breakers wearing balaclavas, and none of the hours of footage of pre-teens and their parents wearing rollerblades.

But that said, I also saw firsthand the flash mob on South Street on the 20th. Since I live a half-block from South Street, I know what the usual summer weekend crowds are like. When I got to my front door about 9:30 after seeing a movie with a friend, I saw that the crowd that night was not the usual summer weekend crowd. The people were younger and noisier. There were more people than usual, and they were even less courteous to passersby on the sidewalk. They weren't going in and out of shops; they weren't eating slices of pizza or carrying shopping bags; they weren't stopping in the bars and restaurants. They were pushing around, they were loud, and they were rowdy.

Call me a hopeless bourgeois, but when I see a mass of young people on my neighborhood main street who are clearly not spending money there, I smell trouble. The vibe on South Street that night wasn't one of a bunch of people taking leisurely walks up and down the street and checking each other out. The vibe wasn't one of people from the neighborhood getting out for the first warm weekend evening of spring after a long, cold, lonely winter. It was a few thousand teens looking for mischief.

Now, whether they all got there through Twitter or some other social networking technology, I don't know. So maybe Jeff's right, and it shouldn't properly be called a "flash mob." And I'm sure that the media took only the scariest YouTube videos and only the interviews with the most shocked suburbanites to put on TV and in the paper. I don't want to get on Jeff's case -- aren't we overdue for another lunch together, dude? -- but I hope he hasn't given his readers the impression that South Street wasn't a little nervewracking that night. And I confess I'm a terrible NIMBY when it comes to flash mobs.

Ms. magazine is blogging now

Homepage, or RSS feed.

Is David Sirota freaking kidding me?

David Sirota asks a series of less-than-thoughtful "simple" questions about President Obama's plan for dealing with Afghanistan. I don't agree with Sirota's characterization of Obama's plan as a "massive escalation," so I have a few questions for Sirota myself.

One, the President has set an 18-month deadline for re-evaluating what's going on, though granted it's not a timeline for complete withdrawal. How is this a "massive escalation"?

Two, what would Sirota have the administration do? Withdraw our forces completely right away without doing something to stabilize the land mass between Iran and Pakistan? Why does Sirota like acid thrown in schoolgirls' faces so much?

And three, regarding his "Where's the antiwar movement" complaint, there was a protest at Philadelphia City Hall yesterday afternoon, which some friends of mine attended. Sirota lives in Denver, I think, so of course he wouldn't have known about it. But there are protests planned for Denver and Colorado Springs. They're small, to be sure, but it's pretty lame of Sirota to try to make his point by denying their existence -- he'd get better mileage out of the situation by decrying how few people are protesting despite the toll of the Afghanistan war on the soldiers at Fort Carson. Or if he's genuinely disappointed at the lack of a sizeable antiwar protest, then why isn't he organizing and attending one?

I don't envy the President's position. I don't know what I'd do if Afghanistan were thrown in my lap, but I don't think Sirota's questions are particularly thoughtful. I think it's staggeringly naïve to imply that it's in our nation's best interests to quit Afghanistan and leave the country in the hands of militants, terrorists, grifters, grafters, and acid-throwing, eschatological Dark Ages religionists -- with a nuclearizing state to the west and a fully nuclear state to the east. Is Sirota freaking kidding me?

And I'm a pacifist! It's all nice and liberal and sweet to complain about how we can't bring peace to Afghanistan, but that's begging the question that bringing peace to Afghanistan is President Obama's goal. At this point, he should probably settle for helping establish a stable government that, if it does get its hands on nuclear weapons, won't use them to blow away the infidels across the way in Europe, invade Pakistan on the one side, go after Iran's oil fields on the other (does Iran need to be given a legitimate reason to expand its nuclear capabilities?), and exact some long-festering revenge on the ex-Soviets to boot. In the face of these real geopolitical questions, Sirota's "simple" questions are just that: simple and naïve.

Open letter to HuffPo crackpots

Dear Huffington Post,

Please stop posting articles that are dismissive of and untruthful about vaccinations and supportive of homeopathy (which kills babies).

Sincerely,

Glomarization